Tag Archives: dave eggers

Today is a great day to take your writing outside — hopefully it’s as gorgeous where you are as it is here, on this first day of summer.

Summer brings busy writing days. I spent this week transcribing 10,000 words in scenes I’d handwritten or scribbled in margins of books I was reading (!) since January. Looks like I’ll be continuing with this for another week — and then it will be time to integrate this new material and newly-envisioned ending with the fourth draft I’d left off on last fall.

Novel revisions are job enough — but every week has time for reading, and here are some of the great Links for Writers I’ve come across this week. As always, I’d love to hear from you in the comments — let us know what you’re writing this week, or tell me what links were meaningful, topics you’d like more of or share your own.

As much as I talk about fiction here, I studied journalism before fiction and spend much of my time online following international journalists. Which is lead-in to say it was sad news to hear of the death of award-winning journo Michael Hastings this week. Find inspiration in this link — his frank list of advice to young writers.

“Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard.” I love the opening line of this article by Randy Ingermanson, as he shares his method for writing a novel that begins by building organization following the nearly scientific structuring of a snowflake. This link was shared by my friend, writer and photographer Rebecca Barray. While it arose in a conversation of plotting for Camp NaNoWriMoin July, several of the steps are useful for a writer evaluating the structure of an existing draft during revisions, and result in wording for an effective query as well.

Do you submit short fiction? There are debates that suggest — despite the additional cost of entry fees — contest submissions fight smaller numbers for publication. Here is a surprisingly practical tool via About.com: click on any month to access a list of literary contests with deadlines in that month.

Along the same lines, Aerogramme’s blog post lists several unexpected submission targets with deadlines for now through August. “Surprising?” There are classics, like the Katherine Anne Porter Prize (for a short story collection) — but also a haiku contest sponsored by NASA, related to a Mars mission, and a deadline for McSweeney’s internship applications.

My writing friend Khara House is one of the best at hosting challenges on her site, Our Lost Jungle. If you are not overloaded in the throes of existing work, her 30 by 30 challenge this month offers fab inspiration to get artists in any medium creating new work every day. Or, if the last 2 links have you thinking about getting your work out the door, work your way through her prior month’s Submit-O-Rama. She is a great blogger to follow.

Other sad news provoked this link, but look for joyous inspiration with this recording from a celebration of children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak’s birthday with James Gandolfini’s amazing reading of The Night Kitchen, followed by Dave Eggers reading a chapter from his book The Wild Things, inspired by Sendak.

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